Other Stuff

If you’re an experienced coder and user interface designer you think nothing is easier than diving into Ruby on Rails, Node.js and Balsamiq and throwing together a web site. (Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.)

But for the rest of us mortals whose eyes glaze over at the buzzwords, the questions are, “How do I get my great idea on the web? What are the steps in building a web site?” And the most important question is, “How do I use the business model canvas and Customer Development to test whether this is a real business?”

My first attempt at helping students answer these questions was by putting together the Startup Tools Page – a compilation of available web development tools. While it was a handy reference, it still didn’t help the novice.

Then use godaddy or namecheap to register the name. (RetailMeNot usually has ~ $8/year discount coupons for Godaddy You may want to register many different domains (different possible brand names, or different misspellings and variations of a brand name.)

Once you have a domain, set up Google Apps on that domain (for free!) to host your company name, email, calendar, etc

Use your network to find target customers – ask your contacts, “Do you know someone with problem X? If so, can you forward this message on to them?” and provide a 2-3 sentence description

For B2B products, Twitter, Quora, and industry mailing lists are a good place to find target customers. Don’t spam these areas, but if you’re already an active participant you can sprinkle in some references to your site or you can ask a contact who is already an active participant to do outreach for you.

Create an account to measure user satisfaction (GetSatisfaction, UserVoice, etc.) from your product and get feedback and suggestions on new features

Specific questions, such as “Is there anything preventing you from signing up?” or “What else would you need to know to consider this solution?” tend to yield richer customer feedback than generic feedback requests.

If possible, collect email addresses so that you have a way to contact individuals for more in-depth conversations.

Step 9: Test the “Customer Solution” by building a full featured High Fidelity version of your website

Update the Website with information learned in Step 5-8

Remember that “High Fidelity” still does not mean “complete product”. You need to look professional and credible, while building the smallest possible product in order to continue to validate.

Keep collecting customer analytics

Hearing “This is great, but when are you going to add X?” is your goal!

Step 10: Ask for money

Put a “pre-order” form in place (collecting billing information) even before you’re ready to collect money or have a full product.

When you’re ready to start charging – which is probably earlier than you think – find a billing provider such as Recurly, Chargify, or PayPal to collect fees and subscriptions.

For all Steps: Monitor and record changes week by week using the Lean LaunchLab

For Class: Use the Lean LaunchLab to produce a 7-minute weekly progress presentation

Start by putting up your business model canvas

Changes from the prior week should be highlighted in red

Lessons Learned. This informs the group of what you learned and changed week by week – Slides should describe:

Here’s what we thought (going into the week)

Here’s what we found (Customer Discovery during the week)

Here’s what we’re going to do (for next week)

Emphasis should be on the discovery done for that weeks assigned canvas component (channel, customer, revenue model) but include other things you learned about the business model.

Add deployment process for testing and staging environments which allow you to be super agile. Similar to Google appengine, if updating your environment is a one command step, it greatly helps in the future when you are trying to rapidly release. For Rails there is capistrano, Fabric for Django etc.

Years back they called it vaporware –software sold before it existed. I am of the belief that you sell it first — get a check and then build it.

So how do you do this. Create a PowerPoint document that shows different features functions and use that as your sales tool. Use it to close on the benefits of the service. You don’t need to build a site to test the viability of your idea or even sign up a customer. (I’m looking at B2B) But you do need something that helps the prospect visualize the product/service.

The is an approach that a good product manager would use any way and it is a nice first pass at product concepting.

I’ve used this method a lot and it works well. It allows you to start selling and get a great read on the market before you commit any dollars to development.

When you do have developers, it gives them a road map to work with. In fact, you can use odesk and find some $15 per hour programers that will quickly work up your PP document into a demo site.

I’ve never farmed out dev work of any significant magnitude. How do you protect the end product? Meaning, how do you prevent the developer from using the idea/code/product themselves or selling it to others? Or is this a moot point in that you just need to do it, hope for the best, and move on?

Thanks for sharing all these ideas.
We are following you and these concepts since we launch our last web venture at Spain 2 months ago. These ideas helped a lot since our venture is a new concept that needs to be tested.
Andy.

[…] to my RSS feed (using BlogBridge, of course) . Welcome, and thanks for visiting!Check this post How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition from Steve Blank. Of course you know that Steve Blank is one of the gurus of the Lean Startup. This […]

I just wanted to thank you for this information. I don’t think you really understand how valuable something like this is for someone like me: a non-coder on the other side of the country where I don’t know any other coders. I’m originally from Compton California, but I’m currently at UNC Greensboro finishing up my thesis. I’ve been developing a web startup idea for the past five months and “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” has been helping me a lot so far. I just purchased Eric Ries’s “Lean Startup” so I know that will give me great insight, but the information you just posted here has really given me great information that appears to be able to help connect where I am now to where I will be when I start applying the knowledge presented in “The Lean Startup”. I just wanted to thank you for this because for someone like me I always ask myself “what’s next” and according to your steps I would say that I’m in the beginning of step 5.

I had two questions.
1.) I was wondering if you had any advice for finding a cofounder, specifically a technical cofounder. I know this is something that will have to be done sooner rather then later if I wish to really pursue this.

2.) Would it be possible to meet up with you? I will be in the Bay Area in October the week of the 17th. If it was at all possible to meet and talk with you in person that would be great, even if it was only for thirty minutes. Let me know if this is possible.

Google Adwords terms doesnt allow you to “harvest information”. I once set up a site on a sub domain to unbounce, selling product x.

Adwords shut my account down. They said it looked like I was trying to get leads only. I wasnt, i was trying to to get orders to see if there was a demand.

Adwords can be very strict. I would also recommend you tell your students to copy and paste “personal information text”. Not sure what the name is. But info what you do with customers information (mails etc). Adwords demands that too.

At least warn them about adwords being able to Ban them for life and that they should read the terms.

STEP 4:

“Create a “viral” landing page, with LaunchRock or KickoffLabs”

Why do you recommend this instead of a fake sign up/order form? Wouldnt the latter give more reliable data to decide if there is a demand. Is it moral reasons?

Now even an old non-coding Army guy like me can have hope. As Mr Ezell said above, this sort of thing can really mean a lot to non-coders, and especially to us born-before-the-internet types. The problem for us age-enhanced heroes is not just the buzzwords, but the fact that there is SOoo much material available to try to choose from and learn that it becomes an off-putting task just to think about it.

It may not seem like a big deal to folks in the Valley, but I think you’ll discover that it is very meaningful to the rest of the world. (Of course there will be some who will try to see it as a “carved-in-stone” set of “commandments” rather than a game plan, but that’s always the case.)

Benn there, done that – thinking out loud… There is a lot of more labor involved here. For example, “embed a video” means a video has to be shot. This is days, sometimes weeks of labor even for a totally amateurish production – script, shoot, edit (and better not with free software, it either embed watermarks or just sucks), throw the result away, redo. Buy adwords – means you need to cough out a few ’00s each, customers, even test ones, cost a few bucks each. Time and money on every iteration, and typically more than you want…

It felt good to read this post since we, at CloudBees, followed many of the steps outlined here. Not all of them though but it’s never too late! One word on where startups can run their applications => CloudBees is ‘the’ PaaS for Java apps or any language that is compatible with the JVM. As important, if not more, is that our PaaS has a unique and compelling capability, startups can store their code (safely), build their application (with a Jenkins-based SaaS), test it and auto-deploy (to staging or production), and obviously run their application and scale DUO (down up out) all from the same platform. And still be 100% Java compatible, no lock-in, all 100% Java and MySQL standards.

We are happy to host already a few interesting startups and/or mobile back-end services.

thank you very much for sharing with all of us. Your blogs are of great help for me. I would say you are my remote consultant. I am not doing exactly the same but something similar with my MSc students in Prague (https://sites.google.com/a/via.felk.cvut.cz/via/). My course focus is on a development of mobile internet applications. The apps should help university students, who are the customers. The course is combining business and technology. I have started this week and I am looking forward what will happend. I am reporting here (http://jsedivy.blogspot.com/). I’ll be grateful for any suggestions, comments, …

This seems like a wonderful class. We are also in an just the right place to start on this class. I am curious if any of your student groups are willing to partner with start ups like us to go through the customer development process. We can act as their technical implementation wing and they can assist us with brainstorming ideas and analyzing feedback.

We have developers and designers on board and are currently using lot of the tools that you have mentioned and planning to use the others that you have mentioned as we go through the process.

Great step by step guide! Sounds like a good course. Thanks for all the links to the various resources.

I get most of the steps, but as a non-coder, what do you recommend as a real life approach to taking on ‘Step 6: Build a more complete solution’.

Using somewhere like Elance to outsource?
Taking some time to learn PHP, SQL? How long would be a realistic ‘training’ period?
Finding a local business to meet face-to-face and take your specification to build the basics?
Getting a technical person into the startup team full time/as a contractor?

[…] the position where you are trying to prioritize which thing to do first, second, and so on, go read this post by Steve Blank. From hypothesis testing to getting customers to the last step which most people try […]

Being a developer I just wanted to say that this advice is spot on. Also for Step 7: Build a more complete solution – You don’t need to go into this with a bunch of features / bells and whistles, pound steps 8-9 into your head… “continue to validate.”, “Keep collecting customer analytics”, “Hearing ‘This is great, but when are you going to add X?’ is your goal!”

[…] customers actually want. Check out his posts on topics like building a web startup, the lean way: https://steveblank.com/2011/09/22/how-to-build-a-web-startup-lean-launchpad-edition/ I know this was a massive post, but hopefully you’ve found any useful tidbits in here. […]

[…] model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery, iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT […]

Thanks Steve – An excellent and practical guide as usual! We’ve started GetViable to do exactly this – accelerate idea to MVqP using crowd-sourcing and offshoring. The idea is to get more startups to the ‘pivot or proceed’ stage in 8 to 12 weeks.

We’re finding many non tech founders with awesome ideas but unable to get started, and we’re helping them get a product out there to attract tech co-founders and check viability.

We’ll definitely be pointing them to this excellent resource for context and guidance.

[…] This post by Steve Blank provides a step-by-step guide to launching a web startup and was very helpful. Tons of great links and pointers to tools. The most useful tool I found linked to in the article was the Lean Launch Lab. Stepping back a little, there is some classic work on business models by Alexander Osterwalder in his book Business Model Generation. The main premise is that you can lay out an entire end-to-end business model in nine small boxes on one sheet of paper. Layer Steve Blank’s Customer Development work on top of Alexander’s Business Model Canvas and you get what Steve Blank has been teaching in his entrepreneurship classes at Stanford and elsewhere – the Lean Launchpad. Leanlaunchlab.com was built to turn this whole process into a simple to use web app. Watch the 1-minute video at the site to get the sense for how the process flows. I completed the entire Business Model Canvas on my iPhone while feeding a 1 and a 3-year old breakfast on a lazy Sunday morning. I switched over to a browser to write an initial hypothesis to test, design a test, establish some metrics and write a list of to-do’s to execute the test. A day later, I’ve got 5 of my 7 initial Tasks completed and have my first test underway. […]

Great article. As a teacher of “german start-up courses” i see a huge issues compared to english speaking countries:
The described point 10: “Ask for money” is much harder to be successful. To gain a bank credit in germany currently your businessplan has to include too many details, which slows up your start-up. In the meanwhile your start-up idrea has not seldonly its copy allready in the net!

Someone looking to start a business will be drowning in minutae and inactivity if they tried following even half those steps. Name ONE successful business that has actually done those steps Steve. Name one!

First, many thanks for sharing this extremely useful and valuable information! I am a non coder who is trying to start my own internet business which requires a website with a good amount of features and applications in order for my product to work. I looked at the website builder tools mentioned in this article but they all seem to be only suitable for a blog or online store type website. How can I go about building this website I need? Can I hire someone to do it?